The world must learn to produce food in a more efficient, sustainable way, according to Marc Sadler, team leader of The World Bank’s Agricultural Finance and Risk Management Team.

Mr. Sadler told The Source:

“This comes from reducing waste and storage losses. In a world of finite resources we need to be more efficient, and to get these goals we need to invest more. The more resources that we put into food, the more we will get [out].

“This is a global reality–not only is the population increasing, but we are also seeing changing consumer patterns. It’s obvious that a lot of these changes are linked to higher income and the higher consumption of protein.”
The big challenge, he said, “is to help farmers in the developing world have opportunities to become part of the global situation.”

Agriculture officials meeting to discuss food security at the Group of 20 Industrialized and Developing Nations (G-20) summit say the answer to world hunger lies in increasing international collaboration and farmer training, particularly among small producers, to increase world agricultural productivity, otherwise there won’t be enough food for everyone in the future.

World food commodity inflation will likely ease in 2012, Moody’s Investor Services said Monday, but the rating company warns that food companies could try to recapture stronger profits through price increases, after exhausting margin-saving measures.

But food companies’ recent tactics of passing raw material price increases onto the customer could prove tricky next year, given slowing appetite due to Europe’s bleak macroeconomic outlook. And so, margins could pull back if input costs rise again.

Major food producers such as Nestle, Unilever, and Danone have been able to mostly offset the effect of dearer inputs by reducing other costs and passing on price increases, albeit with a three- to six-month lag, Moody’s said.

In a new joint report with the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization being presented in Paris this week, the OECD argues that not only do we need to boost our agricultural output by 70% by 2050, but we have to do this in an environmentally sustainable way.

The number of hungry people in the world is set to top one billion again this year as rising food prices push millions more into poverty, the former secretary general of the United Nations warned Saturday.

Speaking at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, Kofi Annan said the increasing gap between population and food production growth may turn this year’s food security crisis into a permanent disaster.

“Delivering global food and nutrition security is the challenge of our time,” Mr. Annan said, echoing much of the rhetoric that surrounded the meeting of the Group of 20 agriculture ministers last week.

Like many experts in the sector, Mr. Annan sees Africa as the key to ensuring global food security in the future.

One in three Africans is chronically hungry, according to the UN, despite $3 billion being spent on food aid for the continent every year. And it is in Africa that the effects of this year’s record food prices have been felt most keenly and where the decades of predicted rising costs are expected to wreak their worst damage.

Where others have called for a new type of green revolution, Mr. Annan called instead for an African revolution, centered on improving the lives of smallholder farmers.